


Unconsidered Trifles

by brutti_ma_buoni



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 22:49:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5473415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brutti_ma_buoni/pseuds/brutti_ma_buoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As they approach their happily ever after, Ned's love for Verity hits a troubling challenge. What, precisely, should a historian buy for a wedding gift? </p><p>It was difficult enough even before the cat (or cats) got involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unconsidered Trifles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [storm_queen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_queen/gifts).



> I have, in the spirit of the original, pinched a love quote from Dorothy L Sayers (Busman's Honeymoon, this time, and somewhat edited)

It was when Mr Dunworthy seriously suggested I should give Verity a penwiper as a wedding present that I realised the matter was a very grave one. 

I wasn't accustomed to thinking about wedding presents. Indeed, penwipers were about my level for the occasional run of historians getting married. But this, obviously, had some differences. Principally that I was one of the two about to plight my troth in front of our assembled friends, loved ones and grudgingly-invited colleagues. But secondarily, that Verity, I knew all too well, had procured me "something splendid" on a previous mission, which she "just knew was perfect for you" and I therefore as an imminent husband had to get my married life off on the best possible foot and not, under any circumstances, give her a penwiper. Even as a joke. If only I'd known all of this in advance, I sometimes asked myself whether I would have proposed in the first place.

I would, of course. Verity was and remains the light of my existence. As well as quite often the bane. And we will never be bored. 

Being an historian was added pressure in this regard, of course. Bad enough merely to have to tramp around the more expensive jewellers and take the tube to London to mortgage my soul for a pair of shoes or whatever the typical desperate husband-to-be spent frantic funding on. I couldn't take such a simple route. 

I'd wondered about the Cathedral, of course. If there was anything I was qualified to trawl for pleasant wedding gifts, it was the cathedral of St Michael in the hours of its destruction. As downsides, the probability of the net refusing to let me return to a site I had cross-walked at length was very nearly 100%. And also, after the recent events, I was rather tired of the cathedral furnishings, as was Verity. We loved them, but it had been a long and emotional period of our courtship, and we had passed it now. The perfect gift had to be something else. 

I had a browse through First World War bomb-sites (another thing I was rather tired of, generally, was Second World War bombings, what with one thing and another, although their pickings would undoubtedly be richer), but nothing leapt to the eye, apart from Lincoln’s Inn, and Verity wasn’t really excited by legal history. A lack of other disasters to the content of Verity's favourite study periods was rather apparent. The Victorians built sturdily, of course. I was just about to resign myself to trying to find a nice small specific bombing raid, perhaps one of those dilatory ones in 1942 or 1943, and trying my chances and nerves, when I heard Verity make a very specific noise across the dinner table. 

"Something interesting, my love?" I said. I had been trying a range of endearments, feeling one should have one for one's wife. This one wasn't vomitous, though it did rather make us sound like a novel. No bad thing, perhaps.

She looked up from her book at me, dewy with excitement and history. I rarely loved her more than at these moments of normality mixed with faraway study. It was just how I hoped we would be in forty years' time, ancient and bent and still telling each other fascinating facts about the domestic life of the rising middle classes in 1873. "Look!" she said. 

I did look. I was briefly distracted by Penwiper, who had leapt onto the dinner table and got entangled with the gravy, but such behaviour is perfectly unremarkable in our household. And the curtain he had pulled down the previous day meant there was plenty of street lighting to add to our own electrical supply. (As an aside, I do wonder how in our historical understanding of the role of the cat pre-extinction, so little emphasis was placed on their destructive tendencies. Destructive, with a face of utter innocence to boot. We had only lived with cats for a little short of a year, and I felt I could write quite an extensive treatise on the subject.)

"What is it?" I asked. It was a book of interiors of vanished Victorian homes – the sort that were demolished for railway expansion, or in the depths of the introduction of inheritance tax. This one looked to be more at the latter end of the scale, though the sharpness of the images made me suspect it had survived into the interwar period at least. But we saw many such images; they were terribly useful to historians. Verity didn't regularly squeak over them.

Instead, she was pointing at a salon view. The usual heavy furniture and endless knickknackery. A mournful looking old woman, who might in her day have been the chatelaine to this palace of gewgaws. And, under Verity's indicating finger, a painting. 

"Doesn't he look just like Penwiper?" she said. 

He (or she, it is difficult to sex a cat at long range in a black and white photograph) did indeed look rather like Penwiper. There was a look of innocent smugness that recalled to me vividly Penwiper's attitude in the aftermath of the discovery of any of her particularly inconvenient exploits. The painting was of the genre known as chocolate box, full of sweet complacency and unlikely lush flowers bowing down to the feline. Verity's eyes were full of stars. 

I knew, of course, what needed to be done. I supposed I could get used to the painting. Given time.

*

The good news was, it was indeed an interwar demolition job. And there was no mention of the painting in the auction catalogue of the Sale of the Effects of Canvey Hall, for such the place proved to be. The demolition crew had moved in two days after the photograph was taken, and comments in the local press suggested they hadn't been too scrupulous about emptying the place of the remaining less-costly contents before caving the walls in. Or, legend had it, the occasional pet.

Mr Dunworthy listened to my plans, and broadly agreed that salvaging this particular painting was unlikely to cause a critical time anomaly, and that I could at least pop back and see whether it was there the night before demolition. But it couldn't be top priority for the unit. I understood, of course. This was barely a step above sight-seeing, no matter how much Mr Dunworthy might agree his historians deserved the occasional treat. Which was how I ended up without a wedding present for Verity until two days before our wedding, and no certainty I would manage to procure the same during my little domestic use of the department's facilities. 

At least I had one more day’s leeway after this. I was already mentally pricing the quantity of diamonds I might have to buy instead, and ruing the pleased-yet-disappointed expression Verity would wear on receiving them. ("These are jolly nice, darling, but you didn't have to. Something sweet from the past would have been so much cheaper." I could imagine every word. It did not make me calmer.)

But I did have permission for the drop, and there was a window for me to make it in which I did not have to lie too extensively to my fiancée as to my whereabouts. So I called that a good deal.

Until, that was, I stepped out into the wooded grounds of Canvey Hall, on a full moon night in 1937, and immediately heard a familiar yowl. "Penwiper?" I said. "Is that you?" 

The damned, amazing, ridiculous cat looked back at me with calm. Apparently, it was. 

Or, it occurred to me, I might be time-lagged. I might be hallucinating the cat. Or the cat’s resemblance to Penwiper. Which would make rather a difference to the question of whether I should at all costs ensure it returned through the net with me. Damnation. 

First priority, however, was the present. The grounds of the Hall were pleasantly landscaped, with only one deepish pond to snare unwary trespassers (I managed to get wet only to the right ankle, having decent reflexes after a good break from drops lately on account of wedding preparations). The doors were locked, mostly, but the window fittings were far from secure, and this was no longer a property at which sudden alarms and nightwatchmen might be expected. The auction was over, the contents of value had been removed, and all that remained was the shell. This was no longer the haunt of the smart set, of Boxing Day hunts and spinster aunts festering with jealousy and murderous inclinations. It was beyond all humans.

It was a good thing Verity enjoyed studying the decay and dilapidation of the Thirties, or I might have found it rather unprepossessing circumstances in which to locate a bridal gift. The house smelled of emptiness and neglect, though not quite decay. The odd dust sheet remained, covering nothing any more, but ready to cause alarm in the unwary historian exploring by light of a rather inadequate torch. The house had truly been stripped, cornices and fireplaces ripped out for sale leaving bare brick and lathe – the bones of the old Hall starting to show through, before the wrecking ball completed their end. Jolly atmospheric, if you like that sort of thing. Penwiper (if it was she) evidently disliked it heartily, prowling at my heels with only the occasional disapproving ‘Mrrrrrp,’ as commentary. At least it wouldn’t be hard to find the cat when I left. 

Nor was it overly taxing to locate the salon (the red salon, according to the sales particulars, formerly the haunt of some rather good Dutch still lives, and brocade drapery in need of some repair but with much ‘high quality stuff’ remaining). A small footstool was the only remaining furniture, revealed when I kicked it heartily across the room having failed to locate it with my sweeps of torchlight. It disintegrated on hitting the skirting; must have had woodworm. Uneasily, I wondered how bad a condition the painting might be in. Perhaps it too would collapse into smithereens when touched. Perhaps that was why no one had bothered to include it in the sale.

But it was there. There and considerably larger than I had realised from the photograph. Signed in the bottom left ‘Phyllis Canvey’, some daughter of the house with small talent and much time on her hands. Could I live with a two-foot-square depiction of smug cattery? It was barely a question. If I loved Verity, and I did, and gladly tolerated Penwiper and her destructive tendencies, and I did, I could learn to abide this. I lifted it from the wall, hearing the twang of picture wire and rustle of nameless somethings in the decaying walls. But the canvas seemed complete, and a cautious knock at the frame did not bring about dissolution. 

I turned around in triumph, and fell headlong over Penwiper (or Not!Penwiper, depending – I was still unsure in the darkness and general air of unreality accompanying this trip, and the fall did not clarify my thinking). It did at least confirm that the painting was structurally sound, given that it survived the crash. Mercifully, I didn’t even put my fist through the canvas. 

“Come on,” I hissed to the cat. No ‘Mrrrp’ came in response. She must have taken fright at being fallen-over. (Only fair. I was rather rattled myself.) I swung the torch around, trying to spot where she had hidden. No cats. An open salon door, though. Bother.

I can’t say I recommend trying to search a deserted, rotting, unfamiliar house by torchlight, under time pressure, carrying a painting, and with no certainty that you need to locate the object of your search because it might be a contemp animal you should be leaving alone. Not recommended _at all_. 

Fortunately Query!Penwiper was not a discreet mammal, and I caught her cries of displeasure in due course. She had managed to get stuck in a high nook, formed by ripping out a narrow bookshelf, and where the picture rail had lately fallen aslant, reducing the exit to considerably slenderer than desirable for a cat of her dimensions. It was a fairly brief piece of work to free her. At least, once I located a chair that could be stood upon (in the kitchen, whose furnishings were mostly viable but apparently had not attracted the auctioneers’ attention), and found a means of wedging the torch so that I could both climb and see, and have full use of my hands to free the benighted creature from its uncomfortable hidey hole. 

The work of a moment. Or twenty. I could only hope they hadn’t given up in Oxford and were still opening the net fairly regularly. I had rather overstayed my initial mission estimate. I grabbed the cat, which gratefully ran its claws along my wrist; picked up the painting and tucked it under my free arm, and eventually managed to grip the torch sufficiently to cast light to get me out of Canvey Hall and into its grounds. 

I draw a veil over that progress. It was not serene. But the net opened not more than two minutes after I arrived at the salient spot, and I relaxed. All was well. The cat was Penwiper, evidently. 

I emerged into the familiar transit spot, and thanked Mudge, who was on late duty. She laughed at me, for some reason (possibly not unconnected to what turned out to be an extensive covering of cobwebs, in addition to the cat, the painting and the torch), and our debrief was pleasantly speedy. 

Out in the corridor, I immediately ran into Verity (followed by a remorseful Dunworthy, who I suspect had been trying to stall her and prevent this very eventuality). She ran her eyes over me in some concern, taking in every detail. Her mouth curved into a sweet, pink bow at the sight of the painting, but her clear brow wrinkled as she spotted the cat. 

The cat did not leap out of my arms and toward Verity’s ankles, to twine and bite in a loving fashion. Most unlike Penwiper to be so standoffish.

“Darling? I- I mean, I _adore_ Penwiper,” said Verity. “But I’m not sure we’re quite ready for two cats, are we? It could mean they breed naturally, unless that’s a female too-“

The cat currently digging its claws into my left forearm was, now I looked in good light, clearly not Penwiper. Very clearly, being about two pounds heavier and an obtrusive tortoiseshell. Also, not female, upon a quick check. Timelag really is a menace.

The stories about Canvey Hall not being cleared of pets before the destruction were evidently all too true. I had brought a live animal through the net without a hitch. Goodness. I looked at the cat, which looked back at me, heedless of the fact I had apparently just saved its life. “Oh, I think we have room for one more,” I said, glumly. It would appear that fate had put cats in my way. And Penwiper was most endearing, when not actively drawing blood or destroying things. This one might even calm her down. All things are possible.

“Can we call him Botoner?” was Verity’s response, after a short pause. 

So, that was all right, and decided. I tried to hide the painting behind my back, and Verity graciously pretended not to notice it while kissing me. It was at this point I became aware of the cobwebs, as a substantial proportion transferred themselves to Verity’s hair, nose and décolletage.

It had a most odd effect on me, though not an unpleasant one. 

“You’re _perfect_ ,” I said, with strong emotion. “I’m so glad we met.”

She sneezed at me, and picked Botoner off my arm before sliding into a dust-covered embrace. (I dropped the painting, which really seemed indestructible, as I noted with the spare sixteenth of a brain I had handy.) 

“Oh, likewise,” said Verity, in tones of love so shining they could have hallowed an aspidistra. Behind her, Mr Dunworthy coughed. All three of us ignored him.


End file.
